inkFrog headquartered in Phoenix provides auction management and ecommerce listing software for vendors selling through major ecommerce platforms (e.g. Amazon, eBay, etc.).
N/A
PrestaShop
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce solution available under the Open Software License and officially launched in August 2007. The software is written in PHP and based on the Smarty template engine and is currently used by 165,000 shops worldwide. The PrestaShop group was founded in Paris, with a second Headquarters opened in Miami in 2011. PrestaShop is translated into 63 languages, with English, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Russian having full…
Inkfrog is a useful upload tool for adding stock from your website to eBay and now also to Amazon, although we don't sell via the latter and we only list to eBay UK. I think it works better as an upload tool than an all-in-one eBay shop management tool and some tasks are easier to do directly on eBay itself. eBay also offers insights - such as offering trending prices - that Inkfrog doesn't. However it is useful in terms of being able to bulk adjust item pricing to include the cost of eBay selling fees. Inkfrog is probably ideal if you have a recognisable product to sell - with our offering it struggles with mapping shop categories (we use lots of sub and sub-sub-categories). Certain listing capabilities cannot be reproduced, such as quantity discounts, and I've never got to grips with mapping products with options and variations, so a lot is left out of our full inventory. Ultimately you will still need to find some time in your day to manage your eBay store - Inkfrog is not 100% reliable sometimes. Inkfrog will also take some of your time and a lot of patience, but ultimately is a huge timesaver for uploading products so it is worthwhile.
This is a great system for small and medium businesses dealing from 1 product to 100,000 products. It is elegant to use and very stable. The system may not be great for converting into a marketplace and the handling of > 1million products. The system is also not suitable for services selling like events, registrations, subscriptions and ticket bookings etc.
inkFrog handles product variants really well. Their platform pulls the SKUs and information directly from BigCommerce and then lets me easily customize each variant with different pictures which is really helpful.
It also makes adding multiple listings very easy. Since it imports the item specifics and description directly from BigCommerce I don't have to go through each listing one by one and I can just bulk upload our products onto eBay.
inkFrog also lets me set different templates for shipping, or profiles from different items and then I can apply those in bulk to items which saves a huge amount of time since I don't have to go through every item and change specifics.
The PayPal button modality was integrated with the PrestaShop system, which helped our clients to complete payments digitally in just a few seconds, this integrated button allowed to streamline many transactions.
Performing inventory reviews and modifying the PrestaShop catalog was one of the things that I liked the most, I could make changes to the catalog, make changes to the conditions of the products in the catalog and all those changes were reflected on my website in a instant, no need to wait some time.
The PrestaShop system created a digital invoice for each client who made the advance payment of a property, which made it even easier to complete the property negotiation. Customers came to our company with the digital invoice for the advance payment and it was easy to identify the property that was paid, thanks to the digital invoice.
The pre-built themes are really bad. Thankfully we don't have to use them and created our own.
The other issue regarding these themes is that they are locked behind a paywall and are a premium feature; subpar themes should not be charged to consumers.
InkFrog also connects with other marketplaces that we also sell on, such as Amazon. Unfortunately, it does not work as well with other marketplaces as it does with eBay, which is a shame since we would prefer to have it all in one place.
Since we use PrestaShop OpenSource there is only community support. What we found is that many other users fight with the same problems and there seems no solution or input from the PrestaShop developers' side.
We looked at Sellbrite. We really liked Sellbrite in view of its glowing reviews and integration with Etsy. However we didn't fully trial the program so I am not able to comment here more than to say that Inkfrog is by far the most economical option. We currently pay around $10 per month, whereas Sellbrite is nearly $50.
It's a no-brainer for e-commerce stores. BigCommerce and Magento both far out-distanced PrestaShop in every major category. If you're just getting into e-commerce, I would highly recommend either BigCommerce or Magento. Their online documentation and support far outweigh any advantages you'd have over going with an open source software like PrestaShop.
Overall inkFrog has had a positive impact. It has really freed up huge amounts of time that would be normally spent manually managing eBay listings one by one.
It also has had a very positive impact by using the inventory management which again frees up huge amounts of time since I don't have to go through and manually manage all of our listings. We also do not oversell items anymore which is a giant plus.
inkFrog's template customization has also really really helped by making our listings much more aesthetically pleasing and more professional looking which builds a lot of trust with our eBay customers.
It slowed down our Hosting service. Our website took a long time to fully load on our clients' devices due to the high consumption of the integration with the PrestaShop service.
It provided us with a fast billing service, where our clients obtained invoices in PDF mode for the electronic payments they made for the properties. These digital invoices helped us to recognize the property they wanted faster and streamlined the negotiation process.
The templates that had an optimized design, were too expensive, this caused that our catalog design was very simple and did not capture the interest of customers.
